Bloodborne & The Old Hunters Collector’s Edition Guides

Future Press gone behind the scenes with Bloodborne's creators to unearth every secret hidden within the mysterious city of Yharnam. Your hunt through the streets of Yharnam will be your most exciting and rewarding journey yet, and the road will be hard. But fear not! These guides are your key to mastering the merciless challenges and navigating the darkest depths of the city. [More]

Traps & Hazards

Basic Information

Hoards of enemies are not the only things you'll have to contend with in dungeons - there are also numerous fiendish traps that are trying their best to kill you. Once you know where the traps are, and how they work, you can even use them to your advantage by luring enemies into them for easy kills.

Fire Arrows

Ambush

Fire arrow traps are one of the most common you'll encounter, and they are capable of inflicting a tremendous amount of damage. These traps are activated by a stepping onto a pressure plate on the floor, causing between one and three statues somewhere else in the room to shoot a fire arrow. The arrows always fly directly at the pressure plate, but they can come from any direction depending on the placement of the statues. Locating the pressure plate on the floor is not always easy, so you'll need to carefully check the floor before entering a room to find them. The safest means of negating these traps, however, is to destroy the statues that fire the arrows, because then you can step on the pressure plate as often as you want without fear of arrows. The large clay statues that fire the arrows are fairly easy to locate in most rooms, as they will usually be along one of the outer walls, however, they are sometimes placed next to pillars, so be sure to check those too.

Similar to the Fire Arrow traps, these ambush traps are also triggered by pressure plates, but most of the time they are hidden, so you won't be able to tell exactly where they are. That doesn't mean that there's nothing you can do to avoid them, however, because the pressure plates are often within raised motifs on the floors of some rooms, so as long as you stay out of those areas you can avoid triggering this trap. If you do trigger it, a group of between two and four Labyrinth Watchers will appear around you in a puff of smoke and immediately start attacking you. It's best to roll past them quickly to try and create some space, rather than trying to contend with attackers from all sides.

Boulder

Flaming Boulder

Boulder traps are nearly always found in T-shaped corridors, and your first clue that one is in the area will be the noise made by the boulder. There will be a loud crash as the boulder drops down at once end of the corridor, followed by a rumbling as it makes its way along it. When you reach to the junction in the corridor, stop and watch to see which direction the boulder is rolling in; depending on which way you want to go, you'll either need to follow behind the boulder after it passes you, or quickly run in the opposite direction and try to get past the point at which the boulders are dropping down. Most of these corridors have small alcoves along them that you can duck into to avoid the boulder.

You'll encounter Flaming Boulder traps exclusively in the spiral staircase rooms. Every time you start going up one of these stairways, listen out for the sound of the boulder rolling down towards you. If you hear one coming, simply run off the side of the stairs to safety and wait for the boulder to roll by.

Swinging Axes

Crumbling Floors

Swinging Axes can often be found along narrow stone bridges in the sewer-types areas of dungeons. Each of the axes swings at a consistent pace, so the first thing you should do is watch them to get familiar with how long it takes them to swing past you each time.
Next, check the configuration of the axes; sometimes there will be a single one followed by a gap, and then two more after that that are close together, and other times it will be the opposite way round. To get past the axes, get as close as you can by turning the camera to the side so that you get a better view, and then as soon as the first one passes you, start running Very rarely will you be able to make it past all of the axes in a single sprint, so make sure you've identified where the safe gap that you can stand in is If you're near the end and it looks like you might get hit, it's worth trying to roll forward to safety, since a roll moves slightly quicker than running.

If you step onto a weak section of floor, it will collapse and you'll be dropped into an area below, usually into a room filled with enemies. Spotting these sections of floor is extremely difficult and the only signs are slightly separated bricks on the floor; most pitfalls are in the middle of rooms or corridors, so if you're concerned, just stick to the walls and you can avoid them. Keeping track of which floor you're on in a layer will help too, because if you're on the bottom floor, you won't have to worry about them at all.

Guillotines

Warp

Guillotine traps are some of the more dangerous ones you'll encounter, due to their speed and lethal amounts of damage they inflict. Like many other traps they are triggered by a pressure plate on the floor, but the guillotine will also be extremely close to it, so if you're just running through and area and trigger one, you won't have time to react. You'll nearly always find these traps in just inside doorways at the start of narrow corridors, usually obscured by smoke, so it's always best to approach these areas cautiously. To get past it you either need to jump over the pressure plate, or a much safer approach is to walk slowly onto it to trigger the trap, and then move past the guillotine while it resets.

These traps are quite rare and will only appear in some of the later dungeons on the landings of some staircases. The trap area consists of a faint ring of candles on the floor, and if you step into it, they will light up and you will be warped to a nearby room. The rooms that you end up in will always be ones that are filled with enemies, but as with the crumbling floors, depending on the route you took through the dungeon you may have already cleared out the enemies in the room the trap sends you to.

Bloodlickers

The Bloodlickers from Forsaken Cainhurst Castle also turn up in dungeons, and their appetite for blood is just as strong here. After killing any strong enemy, and then heading off to other parts of the layer, there's a chance that when you return to the room you killed it in a Bloodlicker will appear to feed on the corpse. There's no indication that this has happened, so you won't know until you come face-to-face with one after reentering a room. In some of the higher depth dungeons these enemies can be very deadly, so you'll need to consider carefully whether to take one on or simply run past it.